Bring back the boozy lunch // ‘planner-speak’ // radio raps

Dominic Mills would bet good money that there would be fewer splits between clients and agencies if only they would get sloshed together more often – plus: a planner to make you squirm with embarrassment, and Radiocentre’s excellent new campaign

I met someone for a late afternoon cuppa last week. “Did I want wine?,” she asked. She’d just come from a boozy lunch with a client and, she said, sometimes “it’s better just to keep going.”

She added: “OMG, it was good. That was my first boozy lunch in ages.”

By coincidence, I’d been talking to someone else the week before who also lamented the disappearance of the boozy lunch with the client. “Come on,” she said, “ask yourself when was the last time you went on a lunch when there was no point going back to the office. I bet you can’t remember.”

I can’t. And I’m not the only one. The boozy lunch has been retired, a relic of a bygone age, the victim of a business culture in which time is everything, and besides the client would have to get sign-off from their compliance department, let alone a health-and-safety waiver in case they injured themselves.

This is a world in which the time-sheet dominates, and the appearance of propriety and efficiency – as opposed to its actuality – is everything.

Even if the gains for both sides are significant, it’s hard to imagine the client’s procurement department agreeing to a time-sheet that has the afternoon blanked out.

But before you think this a trip down retro-lane, a nostalgia-and-alcohol-infused yearning for the sunny uplands of the past, think again. It’s the idea of the boozy lunch as a purpose-filled occasion.
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The purpose here is to build trust between agency and client. And trust comes when the two spend time together, and where alcohol contributes to breaking down the barriers. It’s when two people understand each other as human beings, away from the meeting room and the agenda for the day, when they talk about anything but work.

It’s a lot more effective – and cheaper – than one of those awful away-day sessions.

I’d put good money on the fact that, were this to happen more often, there’d be fewer needless splits between clients and agencies. The IPA advocates the creation of a ‘psychological contract‘ between clients and agencies to sit alongside the more formal, and sadly this lacks any clauses about boozy lunches. But it’s not too late to add them, say on a once-a-year basis.

Of course, alcohol-fuelled lunches are an almost peculiarly Anglo-Saxon thing (maybe the French too), and I admit that, as the ad industry struggles to make itself more diverse racially, culturally and by gender, so there will be many for whom a boozy lunch is an anathema. You can’t make attendance compulsory.

Planner gibberish

I owe one to the Ad Contrarian, who in turn owes Rich Siegel for discovering this video featuring planners talking, well, gibberish.

It is called ‘”Strategy” versus Planning’ and it’ll make you squirm with embarrassment, so those of a sensitive disposition should proceed with care. But here’s a transcript of one trying to explain what she does (from about 48 seconds in), and the difference between strategy and planning.

Let’s be generous and assume she’d just come back from a boozy lunch.

“I mean I would say I don’t think it’s like they’re two separate things as kind of like it’s a rectangle square situation…and like erm you’re right, strategy it does have a lot of different meanings…for me I feel like [pause] sometimes the most simple and direct definition is the easiest one to understand and while I could say like I could do this strategy or this strategy or this strategy or this strategy I feel like I could just define it as this and be able to go outside of that box I find it easier for myself and the people I work with just put it in a definition that isn’t as fluid because then they understand [pause] a little…I don’t know, yeah, I go back and forth.”

Hmm. These are the people who are supposed to provide insight.

Still, it’s good to see the ‘inside/outside the box’ concept is alive and well, but the ‘rectangle square situation’ thing is a new one on me.

Anyway, my question is this: would you want to work with a planner who defines what they do in this way? No. No wonder they have trouble justifying themselves.

I have a simple rule on these things. If you can’t explain what you do to your parents, you’re in trouble.

It reminds me of a senior agency figure who became so frustrated at his parents’ inability to understand what he did (or possibly his failure to explain it to them) that he stayed up late one evening to do a PowerPoint deck to help them.

Rappin Keith Weed

I’m loving the new radio ads by Lucky Generals for Radiocentre in a bid to get marketers to take radio more seriously. The first one uses rap to target Unilever’s Keith Weed.

“You can be the leader, Keith Weed from Unilever,” it goes. “When you need some traction, this is your call to action. We’re not here to preach about this thing called reach. OMG to the FMCG.”

Brilliant. You can listen to the audio here.

And full marks to Weed for responding via Monkey with this PG Tips rap.

Fun though it is, we shouldn’t forget how hard it is for media trade bodies to advertise themselves. You have to use your medium (even if it isn’t necessarily the best for this particular purpose), and it has to be seriously good – as good, if not better, than anything else out there.

Many years ago, the then Radio Advertising Bureau recruited me and a leading marketer each to record some ads promoting radio. They were to be broadcast on national radio. I told my family to listen out for them.

We were in the car when they came on. “Shut up, everyone,” I ordered them, as the soundtrack opened with “…and here’s Campaign editor Dominic Mills talking about the power of radio.”

Only it wasn’t. They’d mixed up the audio and played the one by the stellar marketer who, incidentally, had a voice like Adrian Mole. Fuck, I was furious. And to my family, I’d become a joke.